The Stonemason
Fernando was a stonemason�copying marble figures for artists was only a sideline for him.
Always, from the beginning of history, buildings of any consequence were made of stone and the mason was the builder. Out of raw boulders he made slabs and moldings and building blocks, and set them in place. He was in charge of the work, he executed the achitect�s plan.
You don�t see the stonemason around any longer. Modern construction doesn�t use much natural stone (or natural anything), and stonework, which is anyway only a question of cutting with a disk-saw and gluing, has become a side-line of the carpenter.
But the mason used to be everywhere.
He worked outdoors, usually in an empty lot on the outskirts of town. There was no point in hauling heavy stones into a shed for the advantages of a roof. The roof could more easily be brought to the stone as a canvas.
He lit a fire like a hobo�s fire for warming his water and his hands, and chipped away. You can see his yard in many great paintings: in Canaletto, in Brueghel, in Goya.
Illustration 1: The Stonemason�s Yard by Canaletto
Sometimes these yards were right beside the roads or the canals where the big raw blocks came in. It made no sense to roll them through town, especially since most of their weight and bulk would disappear a few days after he started to work on them.
Stones were hard to move but much easier than you would think. A big jack (like the one beside the boat in The Jumping Horse picture by Constable) and iron rods for rollers, plus a few sidewalk bars and wooden planks are all you need to move and turn and set up any stone no matter how big.
Some masons specialized. They did the fine carving on moldings and delicate indoor marble decoration. These men were what cabinet-makers are in carpentry. Marble was their mahogany and ebony and teak. Some were virtuosos with a chisel, able to turn out arabesques and flowers and other patterns.
There was another specialist�a marbler who did not come from the sphere of construction. He was the gravestone worker. He had nothing to do with masons. Cemetery sculpture was its own world. He was set up near the graves. Most of his work consisted in engraving names and dates in marble slabs.
Now and then he would carve a cross in them or even a design which he traced from one of the patterns he had around the shop. And some of these gravestone marblers actually did statues but the figures were not of their own invention. The models came from their suppliers, they displayed them in their shops, you chose one and the marbler copied it for you in stone.
Fernando was all of these. He took what work he could get.
